Victor called in January. Not about work. A Sunday call, like the ones my mother makes, but with his phone and his voice.
We talked for twenty minutes. He asked about Pinnacle and I described it in broad terms. He said it sounded like a good fit. I said it was.
Near the end, he said: “I made some assumptions about what would transition easily and what wouldn’t. Some of them were wrong.”
I said: “Yes.”
He said: “I think you knew that before I did.”
I said: “I think so.”
He said: “I’m glad you landed well.”
I said I was too.
This is what accountability looks like between a father and daughter when the father is not built for full accounting and the daughter has decided to take what’s there. It is not everything. It contains something. I have decided the something is worth having.
I go to work on Monday mornings now with a feeling I did not have for the last several years at Morgan Freight: the feeling that the work is specifically mine, that my presence in it is understood rather than assumed, that when I solve a problem I am allowed to say so.
I say so. Directly, with the specific language of what was at stake and what I did about it.
I am forty-two years old. I started in this industry at twenty-four. Eighteen years went to one place and that place is where it is, and I am where I am.